Monday, December 1, 2014

The Wave

Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry (November 7, 1828, La Roche-sur-Yon (Vendée) – January 17, 1886, Paris) was a French painter. Throughout his early period Baudry commonly selected mythological or fanciful subjects, one of the most noteworthy being The Pearl and the Wave (1862).

The Wave

I watched from the edge
as the sea took you from me
deliberately
as if I had known
this would happen on this day,
this coiled day ready
to strike me, taking
me by striking you with ways
I don't understand,
and now I'll return
as if you had never been
mine no matter what
I might have thought while
loving you, while you touched me
and sent me flying.

1 comment:

The View From The Northern Wall

Some years ago my poetry took on a mythic flavor and I became a character in my own poems, a mage, "the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the modest protection given them by Islam. Now I write as this mage, my poetry persona.